Better Passwords, REST from Web Services, and an Easy REBOLlion

Welcome to the Linux newsletter, the usually weekly O'Reilly Network guide
to the world of open source usage, development, and administration. Here's
what's new on ONLamp.com this week.

The easiest part of any security policy to dictate is that all passwords
must be secure. That's also, paradoxically, perhaps the most difficult rule
to enforce. Users are the bane of security. Making it easier to select and remember good passwords might just help, argues Dru Lavigne in Improving
User Passwords with apg. This automatic password generator
is highly configurable and just might help keep the human element of your
network secure.

Speaking of being kind to humans, one of the great divides in the web
services world (No, keep reading! It's really human friendly!) is over the
nature of accessing these services. One camp suggests that tunneling remote
RPC mechanisms such as XML-RPC and SOAP over HTTP is the way to go. Another
camp suggests that the existing HTTP protocol, some twelve years old now,
already provides the necessary verbs. What does this mean for the average
developer? As Adam Trachtenberg demonstrates in PHP Web
Services Without SOAP, the REST approach can often lead to simpler
applications, both conceptually and in code.

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From the "here's something different" department, new author Gregg Irwin
explores easy-to-build and easy-to-distribute GUI applications with the REBOL
language. REBOL doesn't get much play, though it has a burgeoning open source
implementation in OSCAR, and is intended to be able to run on Parrot. Gregg's
Introducing
REBOL with Amazingly Easy GUI Programming demonstrates the appeal of this
language; you can write a GUI in just a few lines of code. Would that more
toolkits worked this quickly or this easily.

ONLamp.com and Linux Devcenter Top Five Articles Last Week

Installing Oracle 9iR2 on Red Hat 9
While Oracle's understandably proud of their Linux support,
Oracle 9i is unsupported on the latest and greatest Red Hat.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that you'll have to do a
little tinkering. Roko Roic demonstrates how to install Oracle
91R2 on Red Hat 9.

PHP Web Services Without SOAP
Web services are hot these days, and SOAP gets a lot of the buzz.
It's not the only game in town, though. REST advocates claim their
approach is how the Web was meant to be. You decide. Adam
Trachtenberg, coauthor of PHP Cookbook, demonstrates how to access
Amazon.com's web services with PHP and REST; no special tools needed!

Improving User Passwords with apg
The biggest security weakness in any system is usually its users.
One line of defense is choosing and enforcing a good password
policy. The automatic password generator port can help your users
create -- and remember -- effective passwords. Dru Lavigne
demonstrates its use and configuration.

Introducing REBOL with Amazingly Easy GUI Programming
Cross-platform development and deployment is tricky, though modern
toolkits aim to take away some of the troubles. Some languages have
already solved this issue, though. Enter REBOL, a small but powerful
network-enabled programming language. Gregg Irwin introduces the
language by writing a tiny survey application.

Building an Advanced Mail Server, Part 3
While it'd be nice to pretend you never receive spam or viruses,
server-side filters are a necessary evil. In the final installment
of Building an Advanced Mail Server, Joe Stump demonstrates how
to install and configure SpamAssassin and ClamAV.